It will be recognized by those persons skilled in this art that the present invention may be applied to many and various fields wherein imagery animation is a useful tool for personnel training purposes. However, and not to limit this invention in any way to a particular field of training, the invention will be illustrated and described specifically as it may be applied to aircraft crew member training.
This invention was conceived and developed to address situations wherein (a) several different types of aircraft need to be simulated, or (b) many equipment changes onboard a particular aircraft are done over a short period of time, or (c) aircraft crew member trainees do not require replicated instrumentation of the aircraft for their training. Typically, when trainees require replicated instrumentation, there is little choice but to design a simulator trainer to interface with actual aircraft flight hardware or replicated "look-and-feel" hardware that is particular to that aircraft.
There are, however, situations where trainees may have already been trained to use the equipment onboard the aircraft and they may only require access to the functional aspects of the equipment in order to fulfill mission rehearsal training and/or situation awareness training. There may also be situations where simple familiarization of the instrumentation is required and the trainee does not need to actually "feel" the shape of the buttons and switches but is more intent on learning the functionality of the equipment. There may also be situations where trainees need only low cost training devices and are willing to sacrifice actual switches and knobs in order to gain flexibility as might be the case with maintenance training. These type of situations lend well to a graphics-based simulation.
In the particular situation wherein one may need to quickly reconfigure a trainee station to correspond to the actual aircraft to be flown the next day, such as in mission rehearsal, there would be insufficient time to have the flight hardware replicated equipment installed and checked out prior to any training session. Graphics-based simulation is an attractive solution inasmuch as it allows for software to provide equipment reconfigurability without requiring a major hardware change. This is also true in the situation wherein the aircraft type does not change but the equipment configuration onboard the aircraft changes because this would require an amount of down-time to change over the equipment to reflect the new configuration.
The concept of graphics-based simulation is not new in the art but, various problems exist which are associated with this type of simulation. For example, one of the problems is that the generated images are of such low quality that they do not look realistic enough, to provide satisfactory training. Further, the cost of generating graphics images of complete and detailed instrumentation is very high and there is an insufficient computational capacity in the available graphics processor equipment to draw the complex instrumentation at real-time rates.
In order to solve the problems of multiple equipment configurations and/or rapid equipment updates, a graphics-based simulation is appropriate, but, the additional problems which exist with this type of simulation have to be solved also. To accomplish this, a technique was developed which provides the high quality images necessary for the simulation, and this, using low cost image production processes and in a manner so as not to tax the computational capacity of the available graphics processor equipment.
Firstly, it was found that photo images of the equipment configurations could be utilized in a manner to obtain high quality imagery for simulation. The photo images are comprised of electronically digitized images of the particular aircraft cockpit environment and these retain the correct colors, shadows, and instrumentation details which are necessary for a quality image display. However, a photodigitized image file comprises a large number of color defined pixel elements and these contain no informational content regarding their actual function. For example, a pixel element contains no information as to whether it is part of a dial, a knob, or a light. It is simply a color element at a particular spot. Because of this property, previous graphics-based simulation techniques did not use photo images. Instead, the prior art techniques built up the cockput instrumentation image as a set of functional objects.
This problem with present graphics-based simulation which others did not choose to overcome, is solved by using an available state-of-the-art graphics editing software package and modifying the digitized photo image files to blank out all of the areas which correspond to moving elements. These will include dial needles, switches, buttons, lights, knobs and like "moving" elements. In the-areas where these elements existed, colors corresponding to the background that would have been visible had that particular "moving" element not been positioned there, are "painted" in. This technique can be done on Personal Computer (PC) type equipment and it requires only a little artistic ability to "cut" out the moving parts and/or elements and to "paste" in the correct background color shades. Because this editing is not difficult and may be accomplished by personnel with average training and using inexpensive and commercially available equipment, the cost of obtaining high quality imagery is drastically reduced. A further benefit of this technique is that the overwhelming amount of data with corresponds to cockpit realism is retained through photo-digitized scanning.
To solve the problem of insufficient computational capacity in the graphics processor, a technique is utilized which is readily available in most types of graphics processors. It was recognized that typical graphics processors define their color rendition capability in the number of bits allocated for the three primary CRT colors of red, green, and blue. Most current graphics display programs generate images by defining areas of pixel elements to represent particular shapes and assigning a particular color to that area. The area could be as large as the whole monitor screen or as small as a single pixel element. Shapes could be changed by overwriting the old pixel data with the new shape pixel color data. The problem with this current technique is that it does not lend well to highly dynamic complex imagery since it requires a large capacity of graphics computational power to continuously update all of the changing areas of memory.
To solve this problem, it was determined that one could assign a certain range of colors to the photo-digitized image files which represent the static "non-moving" cockpit information and a certain range of colors to the dynamic "moving" objects of the instrumentation. Because the two ranges of colors are treated completely separately, it is possible that some of the same colors will exist in both of the ranges. The only limitation that is imposed by this technique is that the total number of colors that the graphics processor must address is limited because the total number of bits which define any one particular color are reduced. Since typical cockpit instrumentation tend toward standardization of colors, the amount of realism lost by not being able to create a wide spectrum of colors results in little loss of capability. Thus, by concentrating the color rendition capability of the graphics processor color bits to the shades of color corresponding to the typical colors of aircraft cockpits, it is possible to provide a highly realistic background image while retaining pixel bits for use in generating dynamic foreground imagery. This is also true for many other types of personnel training where instrumentation is an integral part of the training.
Generating the dynamic foreground object imagery is a straightforward and well known technique in the art. The dynamic object images of the instrumentation which were edited out of the photo image are recreated using standard graphics object definition mechanisms. The only new limitation imposed is that the color assignment for an object is limited due to the reduction in the number of color bits assigned to the foreground memory planes of the graphics processor. For most simulation, this results in little loss of realism especially as such pertains to aircraft cockpit simulation since typical dynamic cockpit objects exhibit few different colors. For example, almost all of the moving dial needles found in cockpit instrumentation are bright "white" for visibility reasons.
Creating a combined visual image in a color monitor is accomplished in the graphics processor which downloads the static image files into memory planes allocated for background imagery. The static image files, of course, comprise all of the desired and available cockpit instrumentation configurations which were generated photo images and photodigitized for this purpose. This downloading only occurs once and may only take an amount of time measured in minutes due to the quantity of data being loaded. A background memory file is not addressed again until a new cockpit instrumentation of a different equipment configuration needs to be simulated.
When the simulation is operating in real-time, the graphics processor renders the changing information associated with the dynamic "moving" object images such as dial needles, switches, tumbler legends, lights and like elements, and draws these pixel shapes in the foreground memory planes. Because the background memory planes contain the large majority of complex object images compared to the foreground memory planes, the graphics processor has no problem manipulating a large number of foreground object images in "real-time". Further, the graphics processor is able to manipulate these dynamic object images at very rapid rates since it is not taxed by having to update the data forming the background imagery. Thus, the problem associated with graphics processor computational capacity is solved by this invention.